BEFORE: I know, I know, I'm risking genre whiplash by having Laura Dern carry over from "Cold Pursuit". But I had an opportunity to grab about 10 Academy screeners right before the lockdown, and I had to choose very carefully - and also quickly. Thankfully I had worked out what I believed to be the proper combination of films, not yet playing on cable or streaming, that were going to get me through. I had no way of knowing that "Little Women" would be available for iTunes rental on April 7, which was one day before it appeared in my linking chain. Now I feel rather terrible, because my boss loved this movie when she saw it on the big screen, and she'd been looking forward to re-watching it while the studio was closed, now she can't because I have the disc. Don't get me wrong, I would prefer not to pay the $5.99 to watch this on iTunes, free is always better, but I always reserve the right to feel guilty about the way things turned out.
Still, this was great timing, it's good to know that if I hadn't grabbed this screener, I still would have had a way to watch it today, I can't always say that. Like, I didn't take the screener for "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" because I knew it was going to premiere on Starz about three days before I could link to it, that's just good (however unintentional) planning on my part. I've also been rewarded lately with cable running movies that I'd programmed for late April and May, like "The Kitchen", "Good Boys" and "John Wick: Chapter 3". Now if cable could just premiere "Angel Has Fallen" and "Motherless Brooklyn", I'll be golden.
THE PLOT: Jo March reflects back on her life, telling the beloved story of the March sisters - four young women, each determined to live life on her own terms.
AFTER: Did you ever play that game where you just hit shuffle on your entire music collection, and listen to whatever songs come up randomly in the mix? There's an odd phenomenon that sometimes occurs when you do this, where you find songs that are particularly relevant to what's going on in your life. I started finding songs that pertained in some way to the current pandemic, like a couple weeks ago "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads popped up - with lines like "I got some groceries / Some peanut butter / Should last a couple of days." This happened right around the time people were panic-buying at the supermarkets. Today it was "Underground" by Men at Work, with the lyrics "Keep all the home fires burning / Don't let the lights go out / The streets are empty, and there's nobody about." There have been other examples, I probably should have taken notes and compiled some kind of "pandemic playlist", but that seems kind of crass.
In that vein, "Little Women" might be the perfect film for these times - of course, back then the big sickness going around was scarlet fever, and people were just starting to figure out how diseases get spread, because at one point in the story Beth goes to visit the Hummel family, on the poor side of town, and after that, she comes down with the disease herself. It's also funny, just two days ago in "The Professor and the Madman", I saw two characters discussing what we now know as sanitary medical procedures like it was a recent scientific breakthrough, which of course it was. In "Little Women", I didn't understand at first why Jo would share a bed with Beth, who had the scarlet fever, but I went back and checked a previous line of dialogue - everyone else in the family had the illness before, except for Amy, and they were therefore immune to it.
This is also a great film to watch if you're self-isolated or quarantined right now, because it's filled with all kinds of pre-internet indoor pastimes that the March sisters engage in, so if you're looking for ideas, inspiration is here. They play piano, they write and perform plays, they do each other's hair, they plan to make dresses, they write letters and novels. Throw in some baking and a few jigsaw puzzles, and that could be a full day's worth of hobbies, even now. (They also go ice-skating, painting in the park and out to a debutante ball, but let's ignore the things we can't do these days.). So suddenly this great American novel by - ooh, I want to say Nathaniel Hawthorne - is very relevant again. The March sisters are also home-schooled while their father was a parson on the front lines of the Civil War - and right now there are a lot of kids home from school while their parents might be doing essential front-line work to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Of course, just as there's no way that the author (which one of the Bronte sisters wrote this story, again? I must remember to look that up) could have known what the news of 2020 would be - just as there's no way that director Greta Gerwig could have known when filming this that it could possibly be so particularly relevant to current events. Unfortunately, I've got some very big beefs with the things that WERE done to "modernize" this classic story, which was set in Massachusetts during the Civil War.
The biggest fault, in my opinion, is the application of modern editing techniques - this is a trend that's been gaining much ground in the last decade, and I've railed against it here many, many times. Directors these days like to chop up a story into little snippets, and effectively throw all the pieces of film up into the air, and however they land, that's the order they go into the movie. It covers up a lot of narrative flaws that a perfectly linear story might have, because they can skip over all the slow parts of the characters' lives, and (ideally) they can draw connections between events in the past, present and/or future that otherwise dumb moviegoers might have missed in the first viewing. It's a method of spoon-feeding the public, and God knows some in the audience need a whole lot of help, because it takes THIS event from five years ago and places it right next to THAT event five years later, and we can now easily see the connection, or the irony, between the two things.
Some films, like the 2019 "Little Women" (based on the classic story from....is it Jane Austen? It's gotta be Austen, right?) prefer to have two timelines, and just kind of toggle back and forth between the present and the past (or in this case, 1861 and 1868). The problem then becomes, you have to go out of your way to make it clear which timeline each scene is in, because this can get very confusing, very quickly. It took me fifteen full minutes to realize that's what the editor here was doing, because they only had an on-screen graphic ONE TIME that read, "Meanwhile, seven years earlier..." or words to that effect. From that point, the film bounces back and forth liberally in time, and it's quite distracting. After a half-hour of this I had to stop and review the plot-line of "Little Women", (the novel by...Mark Twain? No, that can't be right.) just so I could get it straight, what happens when. What I realized, pretty early on, is that this editing technique can get used, but also easily abused. What classic moments from the novel are we missing here, just because they couldn't be cheekily juxtaposed with a moment from another part of the timeline, with an ironic wink and a nod?
For example, there's a scene midway through when the March sisters go to the beach, and fly kites, and this happens to be where Amy meets Fred Vaughn (that turns out to be important later). This is immediately followed by a scene on a beach with Jo and Beth sitting on a blanket, and if you're not paying close attention, it's easy to think that this is the same scene, same beach, same timeline. You might notice that one beach day is much cloudier than the other, or that Jo is wearing a different outfit, but then again, you might not. There's just too much potential confusion that gets sown by Frankensteining all these little story fragments together in such a cutesy way. ("Frankenstein" was written by Mary Shelley - didn't she also write "Little Women"? No, that's not right either.)
And so there had to be all these little indicators, clues to indicate which timeline we're currently in at any given moment - Jo had short hair in the later years, Amy was traveling with Aunt March in Europe later in the story, so if Amy's in the family house, or Jo has long hair, we're back in 1861. People, this is way too much work, and none of it would be necessary if the story would just start at the beginning, have the middle in the middle, and end with the ending, as a story should. There are great advantages to telling a story in linear fashion, as the great American author Harriet Beecher Stowe intended. (Nope, that's not right either, she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin".)
There's this little thing called suspense and dramatic tension, which only comes about when we, the audience do NOT know what's going to happen, and that gets thrown right out the window here. Very early on, when Amy's in Europe traveling, and she bumps into Laurie, she talks to him about how things didn't work out between him and Jo. Hello, talk about a spoiler alert! This happens before we even see the scene where the sisters MEET Laurie, and now we know that a) they're going to meet, b) Laurie and Jo have some kind of feelings for each other, and c) ultimately it doesn't work out that way. We're giving away the whole store here, and we've only JUST opened for business! I remember a similar problem with the film "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot", which had similar problems caused by the non-linear editing. (We see John Callahan attend his first AA meeting about 17 times, it gets redundant after a while.)
I would love to find out now if they shot this whole film with the intent of spooling out the storyline linearly, as the author intended, or if this was always the plan, to put this toggling pattern into play, hoping for a Tarantino-like twist when we see a focus on Travolta's character alive in one timeline, after seeing him get shot and killed previously in another. I'll allow Tarantino to get away with this style because he seems like he knows what he's doing, but "Little Women" is just full of random, piecemeal storytelling.
Another big problem is that, beyond the hair and costume changes, there's supposed to be a span of seven years between the two timelines, and as you might imagine, they shot this all at once, so most of the characters don't look seven years younger in the past scenes, or alternatively, seven years older in the more recent scenes. The only way to really do this properly was to pull a "Boyhood" and hire the actors for the 1861 scenes, then shut down the production for 5 years, call everybody back and then shoot the 1868 scenes, and the young actresses would have matured enough for this to be believable. It doesn't matter so much with the adult actors, but with teenage girls turning into women in their twenties, they could look very different after seven years. You have to admit, it would have been easier to tell immediately if we were seeing a scene set in 1861 or 1868 if the actresses looked more mature in the later scenes. (Another big problem, three of the girls look somewhat alike, but Emma Watson as the oldest sister doesn't resemble the others. It's mostly OK, unless it causes you to wonder if she had a different father, and then it does become something of a distraction, because it affects the story.)
Another big problem is the fake-out - and if you're a fan of the original novel (by...is it George Elliot? I know that was a woman, even if she was named "George") you might know exactly what I'm referring to. Even if you're not familiar with the story, I can see movie fans getting very, very angry after being shown a scene as if it is REAL, which then turns out to not be so. Filmmakers need to be very, very careful about this, when depicting something that is a character's dream, or fantasy, to do enough to distinguish that from the surrounding reality that is the rest of the movie. Again, if someone in the theater or at home is not paying close attention, it's very easy to mistake a character's fantasy as reality, especially if you don't make the picture go all wavy and play that ethereal music that lets us know we're looking at a dream. And then when you take that scene, which didn't happen, and juxtapose it against on that looks almost exactly the same that DID happen, it almost feels like both contradictory things happened, and that's just not possible.
Then we have a character who becomes a writer, and as I've learned from watching MANY movies with writers struggling to write in them, the character is probably a stand-in for the writer. (Who I know is Louisa May Alcott, I've just been funning with you this whole time.). This is another trendy, modern-like thing, most recently seen by me in "Marriage Story" and "The Tree of Life", where a writer/director used the elements from his own life to tell, and the characters are based on real people, with some of the elements changed. So I think maybe I can use this to crack the code on Alcott - Jo, the sister who wants to be a writer, is the stand-in for Alcott herself. Then when I looked up the details of Alcott's life, everything sort of fell into place - she was the second oldest of four sisters, and surprise, they also lived in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott's younger sister Elizabeth died of scarlet fever, and another sister's name (Abigail MAY) is an anagram for AMY, so there you go. One major difference between Alcott and Jo March is that Alcott never married, but it seems crucial to the plot of Jo March that she eventually find a suitable husband.
So the film has to do this "book within the book" bit, where Jo March brings her novel (also called "Little Women" to a publisher and argues with him about the ending, whether Jo (in the book) should consent to marriage, even if Jo (in the film) remains against it, like Alcott. Again, like the fake-out I complained against above, this feels like an attempt to have both things part of the story, even though they clearly contradict each other. You've got to pick a road here, either remain faithful to the novel, or don't, but for God's sake, don't be cheeky about it and wink at the audience, as if to say, "Ahh, look what we're doing here", I just hate that. Besides, this sets up a logical fallacy if there are TWO versions of "Little Women", one in our reality and another inside the book's reality - in Jo March's novel of "Little Women", is there another fictional Jo March inside the already fictional universe, and did SHE also write a version of "Little Women"? This is like "Inception" or something.
Ugh, and I always hate it in a movie when a fictional writer, who has been staring at a blank sheet of paper in a typewriter, or perhaps a blank computer screen with a blinking cursor, for nearly the whole movie, and then when he (or she) finally resolves the other issues in his (or her) life, suddenly the whole novel or screenplay just practically pours out on to the page, and it somehow becomes the movie that WE ALL JUST WATCHED. This is as inexorable as is it inevitable, I suppose, because writers as a whole are just not as creative as they believe themselves to be, so naturally they all fall back on stories about writers who can't seem to get their shit together and write something, it's a huge cop-out.
There's a vast difference, however, between a modern screenwriter revealing their personal life and writer's block to the world, and Louisa May Alcott writing (essentially) about her own family and experiences during the time of the Civil War, partially because it was very important, both now and then. What a shame that such a classic American story has now been spoiled by these modernist editing techniques that ultimately proved to be more of a distraction than an innovation. Perhaps we can trace the thinly veiled "based on the author's own life" technique back to Alcott. But just because a director and editor can randomize the scenes from his story and try to be cheeky about making some ironic connections, that doesn't necessarily mean that they SHOULD. Just my opinion.
Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Loving Vincent"), Emma Watson (last seen in 'Beauty and the Beast"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Eliza Scanlen, Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Hostiles"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "October Sky"), Tracy Letts (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Bob Odenkirk (last seen in "Long Shot"), James Norton (last seen in "Flatliners"), Louis Garrel (last heard in "At Eternity's Gate"), Jayne Houdyshell (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Dash Barber (last seen in "The Queen"), Hadley Robinson, Abby Quinn, Maryann Plunkett (last seen in "The Family Fang"), Tom Kemp (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack")
RATING: 4 out of 10 yards of fabric
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